


Die Clean and Pretty

by AetherAria



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Fake Character Death, Gen, Megamind Makes Bad Decisions, Not Really Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, also i tagged this as gen because i have NO CLUE what relationships are gonna happen here if any., and megamind is p much canonically and perpetually in love with roxanne, but i don't know if the romance will actually feature heavily, roxanne is likely low key in love with megamind, so i'll just change the category if anything changes, this will... have a happy ending SOMEHOW. even if i don't currently know. where the fuck it's going, very indirect descriptions of a body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-02 11:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: What if Megamind had the bright idea to fake his own death before Metro Man did? Turns out, the author who struck upon the idea would cry a lot and then inflict it on others.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired very directly by the fanart found here: https://tight-beige-undies.tumblr.com/post/146343923321 
> 
> Title taken from the Mitski song, Last Words of a Shooting Star. You should expect this of me by now tbh.

An errant blast of his eye lasers. That’s all it is. Wayne has seen Megamind’s battle-suit things take _so_ much more punishment than that, before, but this time, this blast, catching the suit across the lower half-

The first sign that something has gone wrong is the way Megamind’s gleeful cackling stops, the little noise of indrawn breath that the microphones pick up and amplify, the strange, understated _whoosh_ that follows just a moment before the

_fire_

and Wayne is in super-speed the millisecond he sees it, the first tongue of flame licking out of the center of the metal.  He’s in super-speed, and already beside the hulking mass. He can’t see inside properly (either super-speed or super-vision, not both at once, he doesn’t understand the physics of why though knows it implicitly), but even near-frozen he can see the slow creep of the metal buckling, the steel warping outward with the force of the explosion. This slow, it looks like fabric, like ribbons curling out.

He reaches, toward where he knows the cockpit of the suit is, and pulls it open with his bare hands. Oxygen rushes into the space in slow motion, feeding even more furious flame, but even before that new light blurs his vision Wayne sees the body.

Wayne sees what is left of the body.

He was too slow. There must have been fire inside of the suit before Wayne saw the explosion, he must already have been-

Wayne’s fingers twitch towards-

He tries to reach through-

The remains of the spiky shoulder array crumble at the bare brush of his pointer finger, crumble down into the thin, charred shoulder that crumbles with it, and Wayne launches himself backward as time finally catches up. He hits the ground because he hadn’t been aiming, hits and makes a decent crater in the road, pulling himself to a stop as the suit topples in front of him, immolating completely and wracking through with smaller explosions that make the crowd behind him gasp.

He hears Roxanne shout somewhere among them. He would recognize her voice anywhere, and of _course_ she would be on the scene even if- even if she hadn’t been kidnapped this time. It’s her job. Of course she would be here. Of course she would be among the witnesses to Wayne’s failure.

Wayne tries to stand again and finds, oddly, that he can’t, so he floats shakily to vertical again, arranging his feet beneath him like a creature beholden to gravity should. His hands lift up automatically to brush the concrete dust from his suit, a hero gesture so ingrained that he doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, but one of his fingertips leaves a streak of black soot down his front as his hands brush away the gray.

Wayne stares down at the mark. Stares down at the ash that-

His legs buckle, which is an entirely new sensation, and his floating falters and fails. The concrete cracks again when his knees hit the ground, and he holds the offending hand away from himself, hearing the strange choked-off noise he makes as he does so.

The black dust on his finger- the blackness on him as the battle-suit burns a metal bonfire in the middle of the street in front of him, all of it feels permanent in a way he cannot shake.

His finger will always be black, he thinks. The street will always be on fire. And Megamind-

Megamind is dead.

Megamind is dead, gone, and smoldering, and Wayne is the one who killed him.

Someone is gripping his shoulders, moving him because he doesn’t have the presence of mind to stop himself from being moved, and after a moment he recognizes Roxanne. She must have gotten past the press line, the police line, somehow, bullied her way through with that sheer willpower she aims around herself like a cannon. She-

How can she stand to even _touch_ him?

He can’t make himself look up at her, can’t make himself see the expression on her face. He can feel the shaking of her hands, and that’s more than he can handle on its own.

This isn’t-

The bad guy loses. That thought burrows through Wayne’s mind like a hungry worm. The bad guy is supposed to lose. But-

It was never supposed to happen like this.

He pushes Roxanne off of himself, effortless but as gentle as he can be. He can’t stand the thought of hurting her too, hurting her any more than he certainly has already.

“Wayne.” Her voice is _cracking_. All the years they’ve known each other, he’s never heard that before. “Wayne, are you-”

“I tried to get him out,” he says without meaning to say. The words bubble out like he’s a bottle of champagne broken on the prow of a ship. “I tried to get him. I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t realize- I didn’t _know_ -”

“Wayne-”

She reaches for his arm, and he glances up just enough to see the bright flare of grief in her expression, and it’s miles beyond what Wayne is capable of dealing with right now. He pulls back, too fast for her to follow, slipping into super-speed without a thought, and when she stumbles and makes a hurt noise Wayne feels himself choking. The center of the battle suit collapses inward in a burst of sparks, metal groaning like thunder.

Wayne turns away from Roxanne, shucks gravity like a shawl, and throws himself up into the sky.

* * *

 

The communicator in Minion’s suit beeps a quick burst of code as he watches the fire from above, his toothy mouth set in a grim line.

_success no suspicion proceed as planned_

The fish turns away from the scene as Metro Man streaks upward into the sky, a bright white flare against the blue. Minion sends out a barrage of instructions to the waiting brainbot teams, spurring a rash of controlled chaos as they mime confusion, lack of direction, and then all divert, removing themselves from patrol routes to find their way back home.

Minion will follow them, and wait for the next step in Sir’s plan.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wayne and Roxanne, and the immediate aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcom e to the angst party I am so, so sorry.

Wayne isn’t really aware of himself again until he breaks the atmosphere.

He rarely comes this high; he is perfectly capable of withstanding the void of space, perfectly able to hold his breath for a few minutes out here, but he almost never feels the urge. There’s something about the stars being this bright and vast, something about his city being so distant despite the ease with which he could return, that just makes him uncomfortable.

Discomfort is something too trivial to really even acknowledge, right now.

He should hold his breath. He has a limited time up here, like this.

Instead, he screams.

The vacuum rips the air away from him as he does. He can barely hear the noise, the only sound waves that make it to his ears are the ones that vibrate like an earthquake through his own body, muffled and strange.

When he runs out of breath to scream, he curls in on himself, weightless and spinning with the expanse of blurry white points and the huge blue-white-green ball all whirling around him, slow and dizzying enough that he buries his face in his hands to block it out.

He considers…

Wayne considers letting himself drift. Better: shooting himself off forward, towards the starfield. He can hold his breath for a while, yeah, but if he just _goes_ , then he can put enough distance between himself and the atmosphere that he won’t be able to make it back before he needs air again. He isn’t actually sure he can suffocate properly, but it’s the only thing he can think of that might actually do some damage.

And Wayne… Wayne wants to do damage to himself, just now.

He deserves that. He _failed_.

His whole life, he’s been under the thumb of his own powers. On this planet of absurdly breakable people and their absurdly breakable places and possessions, Wayne spent his entire youth struggling and failing and struggling more until he could reliably keep from doing harm, until he could use the gifts he had to _help_ people without causing more damage in the process. He knows he messed up when he was younger. Messed up hurting friends, even hurting family with carelessness, and he’d messed up even more with Megamind. Even leaving aside school- he’d certainly done more damage than he needed to, when he first started fighting him as a villain. He’d hurt him, caused broken arms and broken ribs and one memorable concussion that scared the heck out of him, but he’s learned from those mistakes and he’s always so _careful_ , now. He can’t figure out what he did wrong, what the mistake was, why his laser vision had done so much more than it was supposed to, but it doesn’t matter _how_ it happened, because-

The people of Metro City deserve better than to have a murderer as their defender.

They won’t really need him much now, anyway, he reasons. He floats, and his head is still in his hands with his blackened finger carefully held away from his own skin, his adoptive planet spinning slowly around him.

Metro City doesn’t have a villain, now. What use is a hero, to a city without a villain?

* * *

  


Back on the surface, back in the city, Roxanne is left standing between a crater and a smoldering wreck, with a massive crowd of police and reporters and citizens far behind her, all anxiously shouting to each other over the noise of the fire and distant sirens.

She crosses her arms- no, she wraps her arms around herself, digging her fingers into her biceps to keep them from trembling, and she stares at the slowly extinguishing blaze. It’s all metal, she thinks vaguely, so once the fuel is exhausted the fire should follow pretty quickly. She can hear the volume of the sirens winding higher, never too distant from these battles, and she wonders if the fire hoses will be out before the flames take care of themselves.

There’s a hole in the center, where the first explosion had burst through, and a hole off to the right that would have been higher up on the suit if it were still standing, where she thinks Metro Man pulled the metal open himself. It’s where the cockpit should be, but the entire mass has collapsed so thoroughly that she can’t see anything inside. Part of her is grateful for that. Another part of her-

She can’t believe that any of this is real.

A decade. A decade and change she’s been involved in this ridiculous push and pull between Wayne and Megamind, and never in a million years did she think that it could take a turn like _this_. Megamind is ridiculous, but he’s still a genius, he knows what he’s doing when he builds his tech, and even when things blow up spectacularly in his face, he always has a backup plan, and he always has preparations for the worst. Even when he loses, he always bounces back swinging.

_Bounced back_ , an unhelpful part of her mind murmurs. _Past tense, now_.

She realizes that she’s scowling and she schools her expression into something blank and cool and professional, just in time for a police officer to come close enough to engage with her.

He tries to get her back towards the press line. She sways on her feet, feigning shock (is she feigning, she wonders, or is the wobble in her ankles real, the lightheadedness, the sensation of tunnel vision she keeps pushing back along with the rushing in her ears? Roxanne doesn’t plan to find out; she has no time to faint today) until the officer retreats to try to find her a shock blanket or at least some water. She turns back towards the wreckage, takes a deep steadying breath in, and steps towards it.

She needs to _see_. She doesn’t know how else to make this feel real.

Roxanne is the closest to the wreck by far, and with her babysitter cop dashing back towards the press line she doesn’t have anyone to stop her from approaching. The heat reaches her early, the fire roaring loud enough to drown out the sirens when she gets close. She scowls hard when she realizes that the angle the suit collapsed at means she won’t be able to see inside unless she goes around the twisted wreck of the arm, unless she steps between the hand and the chassis of the chest itself.

When she passes around the sheared metal of the arm the heat and smoke grow more intense, making her blink and cough and press her arm across her mouth as she forces herself closer to her goal. The angle is almost, almost right. She can see the edge of his chair through the hole, just barely, when the wind catches the churning smoke and pulls it aside.

Another small blast rumbles through the debris, and Roxanne ducks down instinctively as a blast of even more intense heat billows over her. When she stands back up her brow is furrowed in a glare, and she takes another three big steps against the heat, starting to feel the sting of it on her skin.

She can almost see. _Almost_. Something dark on the arm of the chair, a strange tangle, black against the dark metal gray.

Each step is more difficult. She can see the hairs on her arm starting to curl in the heat, she’s not going to be able to get much closer, but she can’t stop now. She needs to _see_.

Gushing smoke, yellow-blue flames, metal staining black as it buckles, and on Megamind’s seat, a tangle of _something_ -

An arm wraps around Roxanne’s midsection and pulls her back, pulls her up and away and after a moment where she’s too stunned to realize what’s happening she _writhes_.

“Put me- put me _down_ I have to see him-”

“Ma’am you’re gonna get yourself killed,” the firefighter behind her says, tone gentle, and he’s lifting her high enough that her feet can’t touch the ground. “And we can’t start putting the fire out with you standing that close.”

Megamind - the battlesuit, the wreckage, the fire - is more distant with each step the firefighter takes, and Roxanne realizes moments too late that she’s kicking at the man, scrambling against his arm and babbling, “let me go, let me _down_ I was so close I have to- I have to see if- I have to _see_ -”

The hoses start up, burying the flames with a new column of smoke. She stops kicking, staring as the battlesuit finally extinguishes, as the weakened scaffolding of metal disintegrates under the weight of the water.

“Ma’am,” the firefighter sets her gently back on her feet, keeping his hand on her arm in case she tries to bolt again. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think he’d want you getting yourself killed too, y’know?”

Roxanne realizes, after a long, strange moment that she’s hyperventilating. The fireman leads her back away until she can’t feel the heat anymore, and someone wraps a shock blanket around her shoulders and sits her down on the back bumper of an emergency vehicle.

She stares at the wreckage for what feels like hours as emergency responders scurry around the scene, and she can feel the reporters on the other side of the line, can sense the pictures they must be taking of her sidelong and distant. Her phone starts ringing at some point and she pulls out the battery entirely. She knows, on some level, that she should be on the other side of that line, doing her _job_ and holding strong against the chaos as she always does, but-

She can’t tear her eyes away. Not yet.

They separate the debris with large, clumsy equipment, with tools, and Roxanne almost doesn’t realize exactly what they are pulling out until they drape the sheet over top.

Roxanne is a journalist. She is a writer. She has given word to some truly horrific things in the past, in her profession, but at this new horror, her mind refuses. The lines and angles beneath that sheet may as well be non-euclidean for all her mind can understand them. She can’t understand, but she can’t look away, either. Not until they lift the stretcher, not until they put him in the ambulance, which seems like a sick sort of joke as far as Roxanne is concerned, not until that ambulance quietly, slowly drives away, the crowd parting just as quietly out of its way.

When he’s gone, when she can look elsewhere again, she closes her eyes instead. She’s not sure how long it is before someone notices and comes near enough again to ask if she is okay. She could almost laugh, the question is that ridiculous. She takes a deep, steadying breath, and quietly she asks for a bottle of water.

There is rubble caked on her shoes, there is smoke seeped into her clothes, and half the hair on her arms has sizzled away, but if she can whet her throat, if she can still speak, then Roxanne can straighten her spine and go back to work.

There’s no choice in the matter, really. It’s all she has left to do.


End file.
